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http://www.wegame.com/watch/swg-gora...reen-shotswmv/

There has been a lot of chatter on the recent updates to SW:tor after PAX has drawn to a close this week. With that came reminiscing on the old times we had in SWG. Thought I would put my own piece together and pay tribute. Pulled my old hard drives and put together a montage of the screen shots I had. Decently long video, and well worth a watch if you enjoyed the game. A fair amount of the screen shots have little quirks to them you would probably only understand if you played the game. Lots of old faces in the collection.

For best quality, please download the video.

Each of us has a different idea of the perfect game, whether it's an existing game with a few tweaks or something completely new. Game designers work tirelessly to make their own vision of the perfect game a reality, but there's no telling what players will think of a feature until it's finished. In the process of transforming a feature from a gleam in the game designer's eye to a finished product, something is unfortunately often lost in translation. Limitations in the technology being used or the manpower available can render the ideal implementation infeasible.

As players, we don't really see that full development process. That doesn't stop us from painting our perfect vision of an upcoming or potential feature and how awesome it could be. In the coming years, the EVE Online developers will be going through the process of making some of their most incredible visions a reality. Ideas like walking in stations and integrating the upcoming MMOFPS Dust 514 with EVE's planetary interaction feature will be put through a potentially brutal development process. We can only hope that as little as possible of those visions we've heard from EVE's developers gets lost in translation.

In this speculative opinion piece, I look at a few areas in which EVE is sure to be expanded in the coming years and discuss what I'd consider to be the ideal way they could be implemented or handled.

Walking in stations

The ability to walk around in the stations of EVE will undoubtedly have a huge impact on the way we play the game. While many current EVE players don't see the benefit Incarna will have for them, it's sure to change the way we interact with each other in a very fundamental way. When we can set up shops and otherwise customise environments within stations, player-owned outposts will become a much more personal space for alliances. I can imagine a time when I jump into a ship to defend a station that's more than just a place to dock. It might be that when Incarna is released, those stations we fight over will become our homes in a very personal way.

We've heard a lot about the features that might be in Incarna, including minigames and meeting rooms. Players currently do a lot of socialising and playing other games with their EVE friends. The EOH Poker service is a great example of this, through which players bet ISK on hands of poker. With Incarna, I can imagine players meeting up in a particular station to bet on minigames, with some using a holographic stand-in of themselves from their own particular corner of the game. Simply giving the players a way to interact through their avatars while playing the game will make a big difference to the immersive factor of playing games like poker in EVE. The same goes for any in-game social gathering or corporation meeting. These are things that EVE currently has which I'd love to see notably improved by Incarna.


Graphical UI elements

One thing that's almost certain to have at least some work done on it over the next few years is the user interface. The CSM has consistently pushed for development time to be given to the EVE UI, an idea that has a lot of public backing. One of the problems faced when considering how to improve EVE's user interface is that there's a tremendous amount of information it needs to convey to players. Although EVE is ofteusen called "Spreadsheets in Space" due to its table-based interfaces, tables are probably the only way to reliably display that much information.

Something that really excites me is the graphic style of the UI used in some EVE trailers and fan-made videos. Examples of this style can be seen CCP's official trailer "The Butterfly Effect" and fan-made film "Future Proof" by Kale Ryoko. In both videos, holographic contextual elements emerge from ships to display information on them and highlight useful stats. This might make a good replacement for the current ship-scanner module and it could be a good ability for a fleet's scouts to have. Similarly, a visual warning of incoming ships in warp and a graphical deep-space scanner overlay on the main screen could both be fantastic replacements for the current clunky directional scanner. In general, I'd love to see more information being encoded in pretty graphical elements and less in dull text boxes.


Building on those foundations

For the past few expansions, CCP has assured players that new game mechanics like planetary interaction and sovereignty have been laying the foundations for future expansion. The Dominion expansion's updated sovereignty and system upgrade mechanics were sold to us as an expandable new framework that could be built upon much more easily than the old starbase mechanic. For example, new resources like comets or gas fields can be implemented very quickly under the new mechanic by tying them to a new system upgrade.

Similarly, Apocrypha's wormholes brought us a whole series of new star systems, exploration sites and the resources for tech 3 production. It seemed as though developers had future iterative expansion of wormhole space in mind, as they told us that new sites and resources could be easily added to wormhole systems for future expansions. Even the Tyrannis expansion's planetary interaction feature was referred to as a foundation on which more work would be done. It's now up to CCP to deliver on those promises over the coming years. It's no good making expandable frameworks for future development if they're never expanded on

Iterating on old features

The developers at CCP have come under fire recently for their tendency to mark new features as complete and not iterate on them. Despite design flaws quickly making themselves known in faction warfare, for example, the mechanics remained completely unchanged for a full year after the system's release. With the Tyrannis expansion's release, CCP announced that a team would be dedicated to continuing development on planetary interaction. This team will also be working on linking planetary interaction with Dust 514, so it's not certain how much the feature's mechanics will change.

In a similar vein, it seems new content is rarely added in between expansions. Even the remarkably popular Apocrypha expansion, now more than a year old, has had no new content or changes to keep it fresh for current players. Until CCP goes back to iterate on the wormhole system mechanics, it's likely that no new content will be added in that area. I'd love to see more teams assigned to work on gameplay iterations and regular content updates. One month we might get some new missions to try out, and the next a few new wormhole sites or exploration complexes may be thrown into the mix.

Regular content updates are something that other MMOs have done with remarkable success. They have a way of keeping players interested between expansions, which is a problem I've seen first hand. As much as I love the wormhole sites and game mechanics, the lack of new PvE challenges to overcome has caused dwindling activity within my corporation. A new challenge to hunt down and tackle every few weeks could be incredible for keeping people actively playing.


Summary

The future of EVE is perhaps more uncertain today than it has ever been. Incarna has the potential to add some incredible new immersive experiences to EVE. Like all expansions, however, its announced features may not make it through the development process entirely intact. Through the last few expansions, CCP has laid the groundwork for some potentially impressive iteration on features and rapid addition of new content. So far, however, we haven't seen any of the expected content or further work on features. As I look back at all the long-term development goals CCP has discussed at the EVE fanfest and in interviews, I can only hope we don't lose what makes these visions great in that gap between idea and implementation.

Brendan Drain Sept 5th 2010

It was starting to feel like forever since any new information had come out of The Old Republic's well-oiled marketing machine. Happily, a new video released at PAX 2010 has temporarily quenched the drought and simultaneously provided a glimpse into ground-based combat in BioWare's upcoming Star Wars opus.

The trailer is heavy on dialogue and even heavier on exposition, as BioWare shows us lengthy snippets of a conversation between a player group and an NPC officer who offers them the opportunity to poke around the former stomping grounds of the legendary Darth Revan. There's a bit of battle footage thrown into the mix as well, but the highlight of the two-minute video is undoubtedly the appearance of everyone's favorite assassin droid.



by Jef Reahard Sep 5th 2010 at 9:00AM

Hungry for information -- any information at all -- on Vigil Games' upcoming Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online? Did you watch the Imperium of Man trailer and gibber, "More! MORE!" So did we. Unfortunately, it was looking like we'd have to be content with hints...


...but fortunately, Games On Net cornered David Adams, Vigil Games' GM, and pumped him for further details. While Adams was reluctant to go into the specifics of gameplay, he did open up about WAR40K's engine, which is the same one the company used for Darksiders. The engine is being tweaked for the MMO, although Adams testified that it was already great with portraying a seamless world, which should be perfect for WAR40K's needs. DirectX 11 is also slated for inclusion.

So will the graphic requirements be low enough that the game could run on a toaster, or will it be a high-performance-only excursion? While Adams admits that the necessary graphic options will take a decent machine to run well, he's hoping to have as many visual toggles as possible so that WAR40K can reach a wider audience. He wouldn't say how many characters he expects the engine to handle in a certain area, other than to claim: "Big, it's 40K, it's all about big giant battlefields."

You can watch the full video over at Games On Net.

by Justin Olivetti

The hype machine isn't pumping up Final Fantasy 14 quite as much as it did for FF13 and its various (still unreleased) spinoffs. Developer Square Enix has a reason for this--the core fanbase of Final Fantasy, by and large, doesn't seem to find an online Final Fantasy game to be particularly appealing. This is likely because the last online FF effort, Final Fantasy 11, is a disappointment to many--it's a grind-heavy, obtuse massively multiplayer online role-playing game built long before World of Warcraft made the genre accessible to the masses that lacks the narrative-building and character development that makes the series so memorable. When Square Enix first unveiled 14--and revealed it as an MMO--at the 2009 E3 Sony press conference, the crushing disappointment from the audience was palpable.

But after a lengthy play session with Final Fantasy 14, such pessimism is perhaps unwarranted. FF14, far moreso than FF11, feels like what a Final Fantasy MMORPG should be, implementing the sort of visuals and elements of the beloved series into a multiplayer online experience. I'm a MMORPG skeptic--I don't particularly care for the genre that much--and played some FF11 for a while a few years back, but I didn't particularly enjoy the experience. FF14, however, left a very positive impression on me.


In the private demo session, I had the opportunity to create new characters and pick two of the three starting cities. After you create a character, the game greets you with a beautifully rendered and voiced cinematic sequence akin to what we're used to seeing in the offline FF games. It's quite the welcome change from being unceremoniously plopped, alone and bewildered, into the middle of a giant city with no clue what to do, as the previous game did. Choosing the forest city of Gridiana has you hearing mysterious voices and witnessing a fiery airship crash, and you end up meeting with two survivors and a pack of ravenous wolves. The story appears to be working from the get-go to establish the sort of memorable characters that FF is known for--and while you don't control them yourself, you apparently engage with them quite often. Picking the desert trading post of Ul'dah as your base starts you with witnessing a parade exhibiting some crazy, wild creatures--until something goes terribly awry and one escapes from its chocobo-drawn carriage, forcing you and other NPC bystanders to subdue it. What are the meanings behind these strange happenings? That's what you work to discover initially.

The real-time opening cinematics also make one thing abundantly clear: Final Fantasy 14 is one of the most gorgeous MMORPGs out there. Imagine the level of detail seen in FF13 in a persistent, online world--that is what FF14 feels like. Square Enix rendered everything about the game with the utmost care, creating a world that you'll be eager to explore just to see what sort of beautiful surprises wait among the forest greens and desert dunes. At a time when the visuals of many other popular MMOs are really showing their age, FF14 brings a fresh aesthetic to the market. The music is similarly excellent, composed by the world-famous Nobuo Uematsu specifically for 14.

After your opening sequence and a brief interaction with some NPCs, you're immediately thrust into the heat of battle. It's in these sequences that the streamlining of the interface in FF14 becomes clear. In contrast to FF11's obtuse controls, FF14 keeps the game easy to follow with quick-to-learn keyboard controls (assuming you're playing the PC version, as I was) and a much more intuitive system of commands for combat and interaction. The presentation is also much more appealing: Square Enix revamped the ugly, screen-crowding maze of menus and text seen in FF11, with such small improvements as putting NPC/story text in a separate window and mapping combat skills to numbered hotkeys making a world of difference.


In both starting cities, the game ushered us post-battle to a sort of helpful "guildmaster"-type character who gave us some maps and an initial quest to get to a camp with an Aetherite crystal. This crystal allows players to start taking "levequests" and gain access to other activities, such as buying and selling (though at this point and level there wasn't much else to do). It's in this journey and the initial levequests that you start to get more of a feel for the game, pounding on cannon-fodder marmosets and simple quest targets to build up the character's first few levels. As in FF11 (and FF11I, for that matter), you must manually target enemies, and they need to be within range of your attacks. The combat isn't that different from FF11: You've still got the action meter and TP-based skills, though we didn't see any of the powerful "once every X hours" skills that FF11 is known for. But the visual and interface improvements make it far more enjoyable. It's also easier to recover hit points--simply disengage by sheathing your weapon and running away from the danger's source and your HP regenerates on its own, provided you're not poisoned and nothing's following you. (Watch out for those crabs near Ul'dah; if you piss them off, they will follow you to the ends of the earth.)

This is also where you start to see the improvements made to FF14's class system. FF11 has a very serious problem in that some classes seem cool at first glance but are actually pretty useless, and others are incredibly useful but are an absolute chore to level--to say nothing of activities like crafting and resource-gathering. The grind for a lot of these jobs is intense. And if you put a lot of effort into leveling up a job only to find out that it really wasn't worth a damn, you felt like you'd wasted your time.

FF14 is a very different story. When you start, you pick one of four disciplines (Disciples of War, Disciples of Magic, Disciples of the Hand, and Disciples of the Land) and then choose a class from each. But you're not stuck in any of these classes--simply equipping a different weapon transforms your character from an archer to a monk to a mage to a blacksmith. You gain experience in these professions as you make use of their tools, be it in battle or in crafting and gathering (since the Disciples of the Hand and Land can't really do much actual fighting with their tools). Weapon rank and experience rank are not tied together, so you won't feel like you've "wasted levels" if you try out a class and discover it's just not for you.


This approach to the job system also allows you a lot more versatility. Need to take out a foe with magic? Equip a wand. Out on the middle of a quest and your buddy wants their armor repaired? Grab that hammer and get some experience for fi11ng it. See a good fishing spot? Pull out the line and tackle and chill for a bit. Gaining experience for each weapon or tool is quick and intuitive, allowing you to earn new skills without it feeling like a painful grind. On top of that, it makes FF14 a viable game to play for those who prefer to solo their MMOs (like me)--unlike FFIX, which practically forced you to party up beyond a certain point.

I was only able to play for a few hours with fairly low-level characters (I did get to mess around with a premade higher-level character briefly, which involved taking a random levequest and then becoming a very high-powered monster's dinner within a 5 minute span), but I genuinely enjoyed what I played. FF14 left me thinking that it has the potential to succeed where FF11 failed--making a game that successfully melds treasured elements of the Final Fantasy franchise with online multiplayer questing.

The PC version of the game is due out in late September, with the PS3 version currently scheduled for early next year. If you're currently left wanting for still more Final Fantasy post-13 (and it looks like it'll be a while before Final Fantasy Versus 13 arrives), you absolutely should not brush FF14 off before giving it a long, hard look.

-by Heidi Kemps

Bioware had a massive booth at the show, and for the first time the general public was able to get their hands on the game, well, that is if you could stomach the reportedly lengthy lines. Write-ups detailing gamers’ first-experiences with SW:TOR have appeared all around the ‘net since then, and eager fans have been poring over the markedly mixed opinions. No surprise, really, with such a highly anticipated game you’re going to have many people who will absolutely fall in love with the game after their first experience and those who will completely hate it.



The very first trailer for Space Combat in Star Wars: The Old Republic was shown at Gamescom as well, and we discussed this in great detail last week. Since then, Bioware has unveiled two of what looks to be a planned six starships to be included in the game. The two starships revealed were the same two ships shown briefly at E3 earlier this year, the Corellian-Defender Class Light Corvette for Jedi players, and the Fury-class Imperial Interceptor for players playing one of the two force-wielding Sith classes. Both ships are now up for viewing on the SW:TOR Holonet, where a smattering of screenshots, lore, and short clips of the ships’ interiors await. While many of you are likely more than familiar with my opinion on space combat in SW:TOR, I will say this, the interiors of the Defender and Fury ships are looking pretty snazzy at this point and I really can’t wait to explore and hopefully customize my own.

Finally, Bioware revealed a breakdown of all the Advanced Classes that will be available to players, and this really got fans buzzing. Read below for all the details:



The Trooper will have access to the Commando or Vanguard specializations. The Commando is a ranged DPS specialization that focuses on the heavy blaster cannon and grenades, while the Vanguard is the Trooper tank specialization, which makes use of the blaster rifle and energy shields.

The Scoundrel and Gunslinger specializations were also revealed for the Smuggler. The Scoundrel features some sort of blaster “shotgun” and oddly enough stealth mechanics. Oh, it can also heal. This is a bit weird, but OK.

The Gunslinger is more of what you think of when you think of a Han Solo-esque Smuggler. While Han stuck with a single blaster-pistol, Gunslingers wield dual blaster pistols and fill a ranged DPS role by using fast “quickdraw” attacks and the cover system.

Jedi Knights will support the team as either the dual-wielding melee DPS Sentinel or as the familiar Jedi Guardian class, which dons heavy armor and wields a single lightsaber in a tank role. The Guardian also uses “Leadership” and can provide the party with useful buffs.

The Jedi Consular’s Advanced Classes stirred the SW:TOR community into a tizzy over the past few days. Options for the Jedi Consular include the hybrid controlling/healing/damage dealing “Jedi Wizard” Advanced Class, as well as the saber staff wielding MDPS Jedi Shadow. Fan reaction to the Consulars “Jedi Wizard” class name was understandably negative, I’m not sure what Bioware’s thinking was here and I suspect that this may be changed. Yes, Ben Kenobi was referred to as an “old wizard” by Owen Lars in Episode IV, but that is pretty obscure and there are plenty of other possible names that could have been used here. This just seems like a lazy attempt to attach a familiar fantasy class name to one of SW:TOR’s “mage” classes. The Jedi Shadow, as its name would imply, interestingly makes use of stealth mechanics.



On the Sith Empire side, Bounty Hunters can either take the path of the Powertech or the Mercenary. The Powertech is one of the Sith Empire’s two tanking classes. Powertechs make use of Flamethrowers and similar to the Trooper, also make use of energy shields.

Players who select the Mercenary will wield dual blaster pistols similar to the Smuggler’s Gunslinger, but will also make use of missiles.

Sith Warriors can choose between the Sith Juggernaut and the Sith Marauder. The Sith Juggernaut is the analogue to Jedi Knight’s Jedi Guardian advanced class, however, it interestingly appears to be an “aura tank”, as it is said to make use of Fear and Darkside Auras. Certainly speculation, but I’m getting an Age of Conan Dark Templar feeling here.

The Sith Marauder, at least from the basic description we have now, seems identical to the Jedi Sentinel.

The sneaky snakes on the Imperial side can look forward to the Imperial Agent’s Operative and Sniper Advanced Classes. For me, these two, at least at first blush seem the most interesting. The Operative is similar to the Scoundrel in that it employs Stealth, but the differences end there. Instead of a blaster “shotgun”, the Operative is an expert at close-range combat using an energy blade, but can also fall back on his blaster rifle, and is capable of high burst ranged damage.

The Sniper, on the other hand, fills a ranged DPS role and makes use of the cover system, as well as ambush attacks and can even call down Orbital Strikes. My favorite post-NGE SWG class was the Officer, and so this seems like a good fit for me. I played the Imperial Agent during my E3 demo and found it to be great fun.

Last, but not least, we have the Sith Inquisitor. The Inquisitor, like the Jedi Consular, also has a somewhat dud of a class name in the Sith Sorcerer. Sure, it makes sense, but why not Sith Lord? Again, it just sounds like Bioware wanted to be able to yell out at non-SW fans who need their mage fix, “Over here! This is the mage!”

The Sith Sorcerer wields a single-bladed lightsaber and makes use of force lightning and force drain attacks. Sorcerers can fill a ranged DPS role with their lightning abilities or the healer role with their drain abilities. Oddly enough, this leaves the Sith Empire with only one healer option, while the Galactic Republic has two in the Jedi Wizard and the Scoundrel.

The saberstaff wielding Sith Assassin will allow players to live out their Darth Maul fantasy as a cloth-wearing melee DPS character, who, like the Jedi Shadow, can also utilize Stealth. Oh, and, yes, you can make a Zabrak Sith Inquisitor. Woot!



What are your thoughts on all the Star Wars: The Old Republic goodies to come out of Gamescom? Do you have a favorite Advanced Class locked down yet? Share your thoughts in the comments below!


Article By: Michael Bitton

In this scene from Vanguard's "Missionaries of Hate," correspondent Mariana van Zeller attends a press conference during which Pastor Martin Ssempa shows graphic gay porn to a room full of international journalists. Mariana traveled to Uganda to learn more about the growing influence of American religious groups has led to a movement to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death.

"Vanguard," airing weekly on Current TV Wednesdays at 10/9c, is a no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance. Unlike sound-bite driven reporting, the show's correspondents, Adam Yamaguchi, Kaj Larsen, Christof Putzel and Mariana van Zeller, serve as trusted guides who take viewers on in-depth real life adventures in pursuit of some of the world's most important stories.